Topological strings, black holes, and matrix models

by Minxin Huang (CERN)

Tuesday 9 Oct 2007, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

I review some recent progress in computing topological string partition functions on compact Calabi-Yau spaces with two new technical ingrediens, (i) An efficient way to integrate the BCOV holomorphic anomaly equation, and (ii) Certain novel boundary conditions at the singularities of the Calabi-Yau moduli space. These results are used to study the large order behavior of topological strings and the microscopic countings of a class of 5-dimensional black hole entropy. Finally I turn to the gravitational couplings of the SU(2) Seiberg-Witten theory, which is a simpler and solvable toy model where these new techniques for compact Calabi-Yau were originally discovered. In this simpler case one can use matrix model methods to compute the gravitational couplings.